A note is a written promise to repay a certain sum of money on specified terms. Some notes are secured by collateral, meaning that if payment is not made as promised the collateral is given to the note's owner in place of the payment. In particular, some notes are secured by real estate collateral, that is to say, by ownership of rights in homes, business property, or other real estate. Some examples of such notes include mortgages, deeds of trust, and land contracts.
Notes are often bought and sold. Note buyers and sellers make contact in a variety of ways, including informal personal networks, advertisements in newspapers, and websites. However, many such contacts and resulting transactions are ad hoc. For instance, different potential buyers may be presented with very different information about the same note, and at different times. A given seller may present a given potential buyer with different types of information about notes in different transactions, even though the same seller and the same buyer—and perhaps even the same kind of note—are involved in each transaction. Sometimes buyers make bids and never hear back from a seller at all. Sometimes a potential buyer does not know which person to contact at a selling institution with a request for notes to bid on, because the seller has multiple contact points, e.g., various personnel in a bank foreclosure department, loss mitigation department, recovery department, and bankruptcy department may each have notes to sell. Often a potential buyer is financially qualified to bid on a note, but does not know that the note is being offered because the offer was made only to buyers already personally known to the seller's representative. Sometimes a buyer (or a seller) has no independent way to assess the financial capability, past performance, or other characteristics of a potential seller (or buyer).
Placing advertisements online helps address some of these issues, such as by making the availability of notes more widely known. However, other problematic issues remain, despite the presence of many websites that discuss note brokering and/or that allow or solicit descriptions of notes being offered for sale.
Other aspects of notes, transactions, and technology may also be helpful in understanding the present invention. These will be apparent to those of skill in the art, from their background and/or from the references submitted in connection with the present document.